1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates generally to indoor positioning techniques, and more specifically to techniques for providing improved position determination.
2. Related Art
When performing positioning in an indoor environment, disambiguating between different regions of the indoor environment is useful, if not critical. Indoor regions (also referred to herein as location areas) may be different floors of a building or portions of floors in a building or different portions of a floor. In this case, signals from wireless transceiver access points (APs) in different regions can be received by a single mobile device, which is also referred to herein as a mobile station (MS). Even though the mobile device is in a first region, the signal strength received from an AP in a second, different, region may be stronger than the signal strength of a signal received from an AP in the first region. This is especially true near portals such as staircases and elevator shafts, e.g., due to waveguide effects of these structures. Consequently, region disambiguation is performed to determine in which region the mobile device resides. Disambiguating between different indoor regions of a structure can be a time-consuming, highly power-consuming process. Furthermore, indoor regions can be defined relative to location context identifiers (LCIs). Each LCI can be associated with assistance data that the mobile device can use to help determine its position within the indoor environment. The amount of this assistance data can become quite large, depending on the size of the indoor region associated with the LCI. Accordingly, accurately determining which region in which the MS resides can become quite important, because the mobile device may have to download a significant amount of assistance data associated with the LCI in order to determine the position of the mobile device within the indoor environment.